The phrase “promote the general Welfare” was introduced in the Articles of Confederation, the first written constitution of the United States. The Articles were successful in outlining the basic values of the new nation, but they failed to give Congress a binding power over the states. In short order, various special interest groups which were not representative of the general populace and their interests were able to gain the support and funding of their state governments, and Congress could not intervene. Recognizing these failings, the founders looked to put in place a central government that would have the power to enforce laws and speak on behalf of the entire nation while maintaining limitations on the government’s powers.
When the …show more content…
On October 24, 1929, the stock market collapsed, leading to bank failures and layoffs of catastrophic proportions. According to John Hardman, this economic disaster left about fifteen million Americans unemployed – almost one-fourth of America’s entire labor force at the time. In order to help the struggling economy, President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed the New Deal programs. The constitutionality of the New Deal programs was rigorously debated, but the dire circumstances within the nation forced the government to take action. These new economic reforms gave the federal government more influence over the economy and also created more social safety-net programs for the unemployed. For instance, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and the Works Progress Administration all extended the central government’s power to areas previously regulated by the states alone. “The New Deal years were characterized by a belief that greater regulation would solve many of the country’s problems” (Hardman). However, some Americans felt that “the clause in the Preamble [contained] no substantive grant . . . to extend the power of Congress to so many new fields of human activity” (Herbert …show more content…
Today, the prevailing view is “that there are no limitations whatsoever on Congress’s power to spend and that the ‘general Welfare’ means whatever Congress says it means” (Eastman 1). Also, many Americans today think of welfare programs as a means of promoting the general welfare, which hardly seems consistent with the intentions of the founding fathers. In fact, the word welfare was used for centuries as a synonym of prosperity and success, and so the founding fathers would never “have associated the life of the poor dependent upon public relief with the word welfare” (Carson 2). What Americans now call welfare programs would have been known to the founders as “poor relief,” and at the time was the duty of communities and churches rather than the central government. The term welfare was not used in the more modern sense until the Social Security Act was passed in 1935. Because many of the early New Deal programs were being reviewed by the court system in order to determine whether they were constitutional, desperate Congressmen used the word welfare strategically to connect the Social Security Act to the Constitution. In other words, “the adoption of the word ‘welfare’ in place of relief was . . . a deliberate action . . . to overcome the constitutional impasse” (Carson 2). Gradually use of the term led to greater social